Buddy i found a perfect solution for html5 in RN so all W3C checks show valid and am working on the theme right now. As soon as i get a base theme done i will pass along to you. Is a great resolution till RN 3 arrives.

nextgen

with Kindness comes many rewards.

Posted:
Sat Aug 18, 2012 8:24 am

spasticdonkeyNewbie

Joined: Nov 18, 2010
Posts: 106
Location: Texas

Sounds cool I look forward to seeing what you come up with. Just a note, while most all of the deprecated html tags in html5 have been removed from RN v2.5, there is still a long way to go regarding tables.

Most notably the usage of attributes such as cellpadding, cellspacing, valign, align, and improper border values (border attribute can have two values: "1 "and "")

Also, there is still too much usage of tables for presentation, which is discouraged in html5. Nowadays tables should only really be used for data and for html5 compatibility should use a minimalistic markup.

That being said, most browsers that support html5 should be tolerant of these issues, just trying to raise awareness of the work ahead. It gets even more complicated in terms of mobile optimization as most tables contain too much data to be legible on mobile devices. I spent several hours trying to get the blocks acp to fit a 320px screen, and eventually got there with some complicated css selectors but it was more difficult than it should have been... But I digress..

I found the following pains in the rear in the forums code. All edits need to be inline as far as class, ID etc.

You do need to watch and see just what does work with IE7 + and it is very well noted so should not be an issue to see just what works in older browsers. Not sure why IE is still lagging behind but if the html5 and css3 code is still years away from becoming a standard i can see that they do have more important things on their plates. After all the "Diamond" which is Windows 8 is ready for release and they are scrambling to grab some ground in the mobile market as well.

I love HTML5 and want to use it so bad but even as of right now i am tempted to revert my 2 themes i am doing back away from html5 as the headache of display between firefox, chrome and IE are the headache of a lifetime for me.

If i had spastics knowledge i could have banged out 5 themes by now in comparison to his theme which is very feature rich and fast loading.

Spastc, you need to share your knowledge in a book and send me about 5 copies as i have never seen you be stumped or beaten by any issue.

nextgen

with Kindness comes many rewards.

Posted:
Thu Aug 23, 2012 5:55 am

spasticdonkeyNewbie

Joined: Nov 18, 2010
Posts: 106
Location: Texas

Believe me I get stumped all the time and probably wouldn't enjoy it as much if it wasn't a constant challenge. Not sure when I would have time to write a book, but if I do you can have a signed copy

I wouldn't worry too much about HTML5 support in older browsers at this point. There are some good JS libraries for adding unsupported features in lame browsers, but I'll need to ask around what library is best suited for the job. I would get it working in Chrome/Firefox first, and worry about IE later... But that's just me, and I have at times ran into issues with that approach.

Creating a quality theme is time consuming, especially when it gets into the forum templates (regardless of doctype)... I have been working on this theme off and on for a couple years, and it's still probably not finished completely.

If my site is loading fast, that's great Although I have to admit it is not a lightweight theme, nor is it properly optimized or efficient as it could be from a CSS perspective. The faster than average load times are probably due to the fact I'm using minify http://code.google.com/p/minify/ to serve my CSS and JS files. Instead of the browser having to download 30+ individual CSS/JS files they are compressed (and cached) and served as three. If you look at the source code you'll see some crazy URL's for my CSS/JS loads

If your interested in trying this, these are the modified functions in mainfile, just make sure you have minify setup and working properly prior to trying this... They have testing scripts and documentation available, which I would recommend. It was a little finicky to setup for me, but I got there. Consider this somewhat "BETA" in nature as I haven't had any feedback from experienced coders on these modifications. So use at your own risk

I've been using without issue for about a month now, but note that it does consume some server space as minify has to cache 2 versions of every possible comination of CSS and JS files. At current I have about 300 files @ 20MB related to the minify cache, which will vary from site to site. One last cool note is that minify will also serve a GZ compressed version of the files to browsers/devices that support it, which equates to a huge difference in filesize, for instance file.js (155kb) or file.gz (52kb)

Ok, I said "without issue" but just remembering I did have to remove any CSS references to files wrapped in double quotes, I.E.

background: transparent url("../images/pageback4.jpg");

should be

background: transparent url(../images/pageback4.jpg);

. This was an issue because minify has to rewrite all file paths within the CSS file since it is served from a different location..

EXAMPLE
Before Minify

background: transparent url(../images/pageback4.jpg);

After Minify

background: transparent url(/themes/YOUR_THEME/images/pageback4.jpg);

For whatever reason minify did not properly rewrite the paths if wrapped in double quotes, so if needed edit your css files and just remove them (replacing with single quotes may, or may not, work too).

This was originally discussed at Guardian's site (he is still out of town), but I wanted to be clear about what code I used as a few examples were posted there. I tweaked the approach from his first example as the files are grouped by the functions above, not the builder ap which comes with minify. Minify requires a mod-rewrite enabled server, btw..
http://www.code-authors.com/ftopicp-5838.html

Guess I just got completely off topic, but I thought it was worthy of mentioning

Yes. Did you have trouble setting up minify? The setting which gave me trouble was

$min_cachePath

Generally it should look just like your .htaccess path (from Sentinel) but with cache at the end instead of .htaccess

$min_cachePath = '/home/user/html/yoursite.com/cache';

There is a testing script available http://code.google.com/p/minify/wiki/TestingMinify which was helpful for me. It still registered a failure or two for me after it was working, and didn't seem to recognize my cache path, which I believe was the issue I had setting it up.

How did you guess LOL. It was pretty much straight forward or so i thought. I removed my import command from my css for the fonts.css and lost the font css. I did add it to the list of css's i wanted minify to pull in so i knew i had something wrong.

nextgen

with Kindness comes many rewards.

Posted:
Sun Sep 09, 2012 5:26 am

nextgenNewbie

Joined: Aug 05, 2012
Posts: 49
Location: Maryland

here were my test results:

Quote

PASS: environment : DOCUMENT_ROOT should not end in trailing slash (1 of 1 tests run so far have passed)
PASS: environment : DOCUMENT_ROOT should pass realpath() (2 of 2 tests run so far have passed)
PASS: environment : DOCUMENT_ROOT should contain this test file (3 of 3 tests run so far have passed)

I need to look into this again for RavenCMS. I know by default we'll likely be using minified CSS any way but if we can process them gziped or get them to parallel load (one http request to encompass several files) it migt be worth the effort.

I agree as this was on my list of questions for later on. I assume there's a way to extend the header class to do so? Or are you talking about adding minification to the core method? (minify does require some additional setup on the server)

I see you mentioned a problem with files using @ import - I'll need to look into that.
Yes, that's the beauty of using a Class. Instead of running around all over the place looking for related code and re-writing code, we know our class handles all our CSS related functions and anything to do with the loading of CSS, HAS to run through the class, so it shouldn't be too complex to implement it.
Since our basic process builds an array of CSS files, we should be able to just pass that, with minor modifications, into the minifier.
The caveat of course is that I think we would need to make it optional, as there is no telling what third parties might have in their own CSS files to potentially break it and the amount of code needs to be kept to a minimum so the class file doesn't turn into a monster.
Of course, we could (subject to the CSS files being suitable) possibly enforce minifing on our Framework and other 'core' CSS by default.

I'll likely be waiting a few days for feedback on Site Guardian (sent you mail about that) so I'll use that time to look into minification.

Posted:
Tue Jan 07, 2014 4:37 am

spasticdonkeyNewbie

Joined: Nov 18, 2010
Posts: 106
Location: Texas

I'll have to review the css import issue with minify. It may have only occurred when using relative paths to the files. The Bootswatch themes use css import but use absolute paths (for the fonts); so they may be ok.

Look forward to checking out your module, but my public RN sites are not at php version 5.3 yet WARNING! The minimum PHP version is 5.3 your version is 5.2.16

Well at least that bit works
I have actually re-written the file change scanner now. Much faster, only one table instead of the three and changed the file hashing method (had some false positives during testing) but if you need to use it, in the modules admin/installer/install.php just change the PHP version there from 5.3 to 5.2 and it will let you proceed.

Having said that though, I hope to have the proper version released in the next few days so I'll send you a copy of that.

Had a quick look at Minify and not sure we can implement it just yet. We might need to wait until after initial release as it's actually going to require adding a fair bit more code to the header class as we need to remove our auto versioning for local files if minification is turned on, plus some other stuff. Not sure the extra PHP processing and data held in memory is going to offset the speed performance of parallel loading CSS files especially as some browsers (IE) don't like it any way. So much to do, not sure I can spare a few weeks to dive into it